Friday, 14 September 2012

A Sad but Amazing Passage from a book I am reading

This is from 'Tales of Ordinary Madness' by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is one of my favourite authors.

'Christ, there were women everywhere and over 1/2 of them looked good enough to fuck, and there was nothing you could do, just look at them. Who'd ever devise such an awful trick? Yet they all looked pretty much alike - overlooking a roll of fat here, no ass there - just so many poppies in a field. Which one did you pick? Which one picked you? It didn't matter, and it was all so sad. And when the picks were made, it never worked, it never worked for anybody, no matter what they said.'

The thing I like about Bukowski is, even though we're different in a few ways, he's just straightforwardly honest in the way that he writes, and his style is about getting rid of pretension and artifice, a bit like Hemingway, who I think he admired a lot. And you can feel his disdain for the pretentious and the powerful running through his books, next to the low hard life, and these occasional confessions of awe or these sudden overviews which widen the focus right out, from the drinking and the gambling and stuff to the whole wonderful and sorry mess of everything.